Been copied? This is how to fight back!

[bigbcasinos]

Hi

I have taken the liberty of copying and making sticky the excellent advice of CCJ who owns Casino Cash Journey www.casinocashjourney.com (a seriously thorough website). She has had great success in overcoming the copycats out there. Heed the advice, it's sure handy.

Feel free to add any advice to this particular thread but to keep it simple, lets make other related comments in threads below.

Hi All,

Here it is. If anyone else can add to this to make it easier, please do so. Most of the information we gathered together was from the GPWA.

Things To Do To Stop A Copycat

Contact the owner of the site and then the hosting company.

Next contact your Affiliate Manager at each casino/program to make them aware. Affiliate Managers want to know about the offending sites. Even let the Affiliate Managers know of the offending site even if they are not carrying their casino(s). It gives them a head-up before the fraudster does sign-up.

For the Affiliate Managers:
1) Give them examples. Give them the links to your site and then give them the copied material links on the other site.
2) Give the affiliate managers their e-mail address(es) from the WhoIs information http://www.WhoIs.sc or directly from the site that copied you.
3) If you can see their affiliate tracking tags, give them that information too.
4) Take full screen shots of the offending site and attach it to your e-mail.

Again, make it as easy for the affiliate managers as possible to look for them in their database. Even if the people who have copied your site do not have an account at a specific affiliate program, it's good to let them know anyway so they can keep an eye out for them. From our experience, the affiliate programs do not tolerate any copying and are very co-operative. It all depends on how severe the copying is.

For some Google guidelines for complaint procedures, follow this link http://www.google.com/dmca.html

Also, here's a link to a list of other search engines with their addresses to file complaints if necessary http://www.seologic.com/faq/dmca-notifications.php

Another great tool to use on both your main page and especially inner pages is http://www.CopyScape.com. For a small fee, CopyScape will give you weekly reports. We believe it's a good deterrant.

We also use a program called WebCopier available at http://www.maximumsoft.com/products/.../overview.html. It costs $30-40 and there is a 15 day free trial. You'll always have a copy of the offending site, in case you need more screen-shots and if you have to take it one step further to legal help.

Thank You,
__________________
CCJ
www.casinocashjourney.com

[casinoglen]

Excellent information!

[greek39]

I find this information excellent. Would anyone mind if I added to it? greek39

[mojo]

Hi Greek,

I think that would be great. I know I can use all the help I can get. I like that the post above is easy to read and understand since alot of us still have much to learn.


Thanks for taking the time greek.

Paula

[herofist]

Seems logical. If you cut off the copycat's revenue stream, they will have no reason to copy any more.

They typically take the copied content down right away when I ask them, although some other do not. Those that don't generally have a link coming into my site, so I don't stop them either.

However, if they don't give me credit and don't take it down, I fill out a form and their host cuts them off.

[HiTman77]

Originally Posted by bigbcasinos

Hi
I have taken the liberty of copying and making sticky the excellent advice of CCJ who owns Casino Cash Journey www.casinocashjourney.com (a seriously thorough website). She has had great success in overcoming the copycats out there. Heed the advice, it's sure handy.

Feel free to add any advice to this particular thread but to keep it simple, lets make other related comments in threads below.

Thanks for a great post here Brian & CasinoCashJourney folks.

I have had this problem with a domain that I was working on a while ago. I managed to get the offenders domain content severely de-valued by using a simple but somewhat underhanded 3way link exchange.

In my case
The sparky webmaster had an automated link exchange system running in some dark corner of his site. So a 3 way reciprocal link exchange was setup using known banned domains and blogs. By linking a scraper site to several "known" spam domains.

Presto, my client's domain was back in action in a couple of weeks and the offender site could not be seen in the top 1k of SE results. (banned for linking directly to a spam site.)

Who cares if the offending domain has copied content from a billion legit sites it's not going to get visits from search engines (which was it's intent)

Revenue stream gone = site goes down = problem solved.

Ok, I don't vouch for BH techniques but sometimes one's hand is forced to take up an unfair approach to solve an unfair problem.

RW

[Fintan]

Can I also make a recommendation, subscribe to the full version of copysentry available from copyscape http://www.copyscape.com/copysentry.php

It will make it very easy to spot when your content has been copied and to report it to affiliate managers.

Cheers

Fintan

[wagerjunction]

I would be interested to find out how many Affiliate programs actually take the earnings from
the offending party and add it to the party that has been affected ?

If all programs stuck together re this then we would probably wipe out this issue pretty quickly.

[Fintan]

It's far to easy to copy and paste so I doubt this problem will ever go away.

If it did become an industry norm, how long do you think it would take before someone tried to fake being the injured party and try and take comission of someone else?

However I do agree with wagerjunction, it would make sense for everyone to sit down and come up with a process and procedure for dealing with these types of problems.

Cheers

Fintan

[Tony]

Well when my site it was copied the affiliate, programs didn't do anything, one of them told me they didn’t like what he is doing but that was it. The hosting companies shot him down when I told them, but you will have to make it clear as to what they did, copy or what ever.